1 <page xmlns="http://projectmallard.org/1.0/"
2 xmlns:e="http://projectmallard.org/experimental/"
7 <link type="guide" xref="index#merging"/>
8 <revision pkgversion="3.0" version="0.1" date="2010-05-04" status="incomplete"/>
10 What you may expect from a document merge.
12 <credit type="author">
13 <name>Jim Evins</name>
14 <email>evins@snaught.com</email>
16 <credit type="author">
17 <name>Mario Blättermann</name>
18 <email>mariobl@gnome.org</email>
21 <p>Creative Commons Share Alike 3.0</p>
25 <title>Performing a document merge</title>
27 <p>Document Merge (sometimes called "Mail Merge") is a powerful
28 feature that allows a unique label or card to be printed for each
29 record in an external data source.</p>
31 <p>The first step to performing a document merge is to prepare
32 a source document that contains your merge data. This data could
33 be mailing addresses or any other data that you wish to create
34 unique labels or cards for. Currently back-ends only exist for
35 text files and the evolution data server -- others are planned. The currently
36 supported text-file format is very simple: each line is a record;
37 fields are delimited by commas (CSV), tabs, or colons; and newlines
38 can be embedded into fields by using the "\n" entity. This file
39 could be created using any text editor or could be created by
40 another program or script. A common way of creating CSV files is
41 to export them from a spreadsheet program.</p>
43 <p>A label must then be configured to "point at" this data file.
44 To configure the merge properties of a document, choose
45 <guiseq><gui>Objects</gui>
46 <gui>Merge Properties</gui></guiseq> menu item
47 to display the <gui>merge properties</gui> dialog. This
48 dialog is used to select the exact data file format and file
49 name (location) of the merge data.</p>
51 <p>Finally, once the label has been configured for a data file,
52 field keys can be inserted into text objects and used as source
53 or data for barcode objects and image filenames for image objects.
54 See <link xref="editprop" /> for more information
55 on using merge data for these object types.</p>
57 <p>Now that your label is configured, <app>gLabels</app> will print a unique
58 label for each record in your source document -- substituting fields
59 from each record for field keys in the all text, barcode, and
62 <p>See <link xref="merge" /> for a detailed
63 tutorial on the document merge feature.</p>